I apologize for the frivolous post, but this is something that I just can't bring my head around: Relationships. For some reason I seem to be unlucky in the field of relationships, from friends to family to lovers. A shrink once asked me what I am doing wrong; at that time, I adamantly shrugged off the possibility that I was at fault, but now, looking at all the relationships I've seen crumble, I'm not sure. Maybe I am at fault. According to my friend, relationships are based on an equation of needs: Pam has x; Sam wants x; therefore Pam and Sam form a bond. However, let's say Pam and Sam spend years together until Pam loses x. Does Sam leave? In my life, Sam always leaves.

Scenario 1: The family

My family is a tragic story that is now almost non-existent. On my father's side, a feud of sorts broke out between my aunt and uncle. This led to the choosing of sides by the other family members. We chose the fence; our silence was manipulated by my uncle and we were kicked out by my aunt because we "chose" not to support her. The real culprit: Money.

On my mother's side, my aunt kicked us out of her life because we attended her step-daughter's (who I consider to be my cousin) wedding. This led to the choosing of sides by the other family members. The real culprit: Power.

Now I consider myself to have no extended family, save for a handful of cousins on my mother's side. People that I had grown up with, helped out, and shared timeless moments with were able to toss out lifetime bonds because of things as petty as money and power. Is the world that shallow? Or is it insecurity?

And I ask myself: What did I do wrong? Maybe it was my lack of action. Maybe I should have gotten involved. Maybe I should have been less hard on them. Maybe I should have persisted to resuscitate the relationships despite the angry farewells.  Did they just not need me anymore?

Scenario 2: The man I love(d)

It's been six months since we last spoke, five months since the I-never-want-to-have-anything-to-do-with-you email, and seven hours since I last saw him. Before that, it had been three years of being tortured by the false hopes of unrequited love. My friends don't understand why I still think about him; their reasoning is that we never went out; therefore there is nothing for me to mourn over. I believed that I loved him in that unconditional, "I don't need anything from you" way. My friend believes that I was infatuated and that love only exists when it is mutual.

Nevertheless, we were good friends. We studied together (sometimes even on Sundays), we wrote a book together, we were dumb together. My point is that he was not just a random man that I was in love with, he was a part of my life and I helped him out a lot. True, he did go through cycles of being mean and then being sweet, and usually we met up because he needed me in some way, but it wasn't nothing (or so I keep telling myself).

Then he fell in love with one of those "hot chicks" who hacked into his Facebook account and spent three hours convincing me that she was him and that he was madly in love with me. I don't understand pranks; I mean, someone has fun laughing at things that are important to someone else (be it a policeman or school or me). Anyway, that was when the man I loved told me that I meant absolutely nothing to him. That hurt more than him telling me, three years ago, that he will never love me because I was ugly. I feel used. They say that time heals all wounds, but this one just gets more septic with every day that passes because every day that I see him, it just stabs deeper: "Yes, you really did mean nothing to him."

And I ask myself: What did I do wrong? Maybe I was too gullible. Maybe I was too nice. After all, the worse you treat someone, the more they like you. Maybe I should have been less upfront about how I felt. Maybe I should have spent more time at the gym. Maybe I should have treated him better. Maybe  he just did not need me anymore?

Scenario 3: The friend

I've had a multitude of friendships dissipate into thin air — people who I gave my all to under the title of "best friend." My dad always told me that there are no such things as true friends, just people who use you. He also said that all one has is their family. I never believed him. A friend, that I hardly keep in touch with due to some petty fight, told me that I was a hard person to hold down, and at the same time, she only remembered the mistakes I had made; whereas I had only remembered the good things I had done.

And then I asked myself: What did I do wrong? I don't know.

Tharuna Devchand

"Do you love me?" she asked, her desperation crackling through the phone.

"Huh?" It was too early to handle the situation comprehensively, I was still in the rubbing-the-crusty-white-stuff-out-of-your-eyes stage and trying to work out who I was speaking to.

"Really…I love you too!"

"What?" I leapt out of bed, red alerts flashing in my head. It was too late; she had already put the phone down with lumps of skin bunched at both sides of her stretched lips, her teeth glowing, her eyes staring blindly in rapture…

What did I do?

"Shit!" I screamed into the phone, jumping up and down like the psychotic prince from Roald Dahl's 'Cinderella' — "Off with her nut!" This was the fourth STRAIGHT chick to tell me that she loved me, and I had only spoken to her two days ago — for five minutes! Her desperation and lack of control annoyed me and, in attempt to rectify the inconvenience, I broke her heart.

"Ummm…sorry. I don't swing that way…and even if I gave it a shot, I don't think we'd look good together in public…"

It didn't make me feel any better about myself.  In fact, I spent the rest of the day hanging upside down from a malfunctioning rollercoaster, viewing my life in vertigo. The palpable intensity of blood rushing to my brain diverged all logic; so I let go of the safety bar and jumped. Freefalling tends to generate the slow-mode flashback effect in which imagery from your past passes before yours eyes in nostalgic self-obliteration…WHO have I become?

Alice pauses to ponder. "I'm sure I can't be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! She knows such a very little! Besides, she's she, and I'm I, and — oh dear, how puzzling it all is!"

Relationships tend to have that effect on people! People dedicate their entirety to a word that no one truly understands — one's dreams, hobbies, goals are all replaced by the dreams, hobbies, and goals of an all-but-stranger that they love, disregarding all what-if situations as if nothing could ever go wrong. Things do. You wake up on a Monday morning, in the worn-out couch of an inarticulate shrink who empties out your purse and fills it with soggy tissues. Such despair can only exist in metaphors:

"The doctor said that I had been speeding. I told him that there weren't any red robots to make me stop. He replied that I was going too fast to see them!"

Don't get me wrong — I used to be one of those cloud niners who believed that relationships were about giving 100 percent in order to maintain them. After a year of gazing lovingly into his eyes and hearing the clichéd chime of wedding bells, I noticed the ring that he had forgotten to hide.

"What's that?" I asked stupidly.

"Oh, I'm married. Didn't I tell you?"

I froze, and was pummeled by the 365 days that had been stigmatized by his scent. His lips continued to move, but I only heard the agonizing cries of my breath trying to keep me alive. Life deteriorated. I became a walking Bridget Jones — the single, self-loathing drunk dissolving herself into the shields of He's Just Not That into You. As much as I tried, there was no life without him. He wafted in my mind until his name imprinted itself into my retina, and soon everything I saw became a reminder of him.

I was just as stupid as any other girl who had fallen for the well-rehearsed lines of Mr. All-but-Right. So I gave up on love only to be haunted by other women who, having made the same mistakes, have turned to loving other women as a substitute for their failed heterosexual relationships.

Sigh. Love is beyond me.

Tharuna Devchand

I have recently managed to overdose myself on depressing movies: Revolutionary Road, Brokeback Mountain, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Atonement, The Kite Runner, Ghajini, Boys Don't Cry, and Sweeney Todd. In fact, my life has been caught in a deluge of everything that is utterly depressing and unfair; and now I'm left within the corners of my own confinement, wondering if this is all that there is to live for.

Every single person has their own folder of tragedy, some have cabinets full that lie dormant within their minds, collecting dust as life continues. Sometimes the dust unsettles and vivid images of those traumatic moments return to haunt their hosts until a type of emotional callus forms and numbs the pain…Numbs it so that they may forget and be happy again.

Life is contingent on happiness; without happiness life is one giant cesspit away from death. However, true happiness can only be measured in nanoseconds, it flits past in moments where there are no second thoughts or rationalizations…only pure bliss. But everything that is good must come to an end, everything that you love will eventually perish and everything that you thought that you would live for will disappear before your eyes. The reality behind happiness is the ongoing existence of pain.

The woman who finally conceived a child after seven miscarriages only to lose her only son in a car accident; the sister who walked into a blood-washed living room to find her family lying limply in the middle of it with their throats slit; the girl who spent her life savings trying to help the boy she loved reach his dreams, only to have him discard her for another woman; the four men who were forced into the boot of their car while their hijacker drove around for 16 hours…all of them continue to live each day with a mask of strength hidden in their smiles and the horrors of depth in their eyes. Maybe they lie in bed thinking that life cannot get worse. Maybe they move on. Maybe they are changed forever.

I'm generally the positive, bubbly person that people approach when they need a brighter perspective on their lives. However, I have no answers on how to escape the darker side of life permanently. I am a dreamer; I can dream myself into idyllic situations to regain contentment with my life. Though, no one can ever escape reality.

Whenever I look up into the bright blue winter skies with love-saturated eyes that bathe blissfully in its warmth, the truth always appears. The shocking headlines that tell you stories of the most grotesque crimes, the fear that each day could be your last or the last day of someone you love, and the constant checking of your valuables keeps reality at your front door. It is hard to live with such fear and pain and, though you may forget it from time to time, it always has a way of reminding you that it exists…

No matter how beautiful Durban currently is, the reality of high crime rates keeps me a prisoner in my own fear. No matter how many laughter-filled days I have with my friends, I still come home crying over the man who broke my heart. No matter how many stomach-aching comedies I watch, it is the tragedies that I remember…Is this all that I have to live for?

I think I need to detox from depressing movies.

Tharuna Devchand

It was last week Thursday, around midnight, that I logged onto my Facebook account, before tucking myself into a four-layered cave of warmth, and found myself gaping at one of my friend's status updates. It simply said, "Michael Jackson is dead. WTH???" Six hours later, 95 of my Facebook friends had updated theirs statuses in honor of Jackson, either confessing their love, expressing their condolences, or simply stating their level of shock.

This blog post is not about Jackson's sudden death because (like Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and Shakespeare) Michael Jackson will never truly die, no matter how much some people wish that he would. Still, MJ's death saddens me; he reminds me of Edward in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, a lonely innocent corrupted by the world. That's just my opinion. Jackson tried to change the world with his music and now that he is dead, he has become yet another commodity. The world wants everything that they can get of him now that he is gone — CD and DVD demands have increased, soon there will be new books on the "life and times of Michael Jackson," along with t-shirts, stationery, costumes, and sweets. Eventually there will be a movie, then Happy Meal promotions and Michael Jackson dolls…Because that's just the way that the media works.

The workings of the media is what inspired this post. No matter how much you may think that you hate the media, it is everywhere and all you can do is find a way to use it without letting it use you. The Internet changes communication completely, allowing communication to exceed boundaries in a way that was unimaginable a few decades back. People now communicate to the masses from behind their computer screens, laptops, or mobile phones, making the world one gigantic Hyde Park. Relationships form with a joint cause, attracting support across physical borders so that the world can be heard as one voice and, hopefully, that voice will finally be big enough to bring about change for the better.

Within a couple of hours, the news of Jackson's death spread across the world…Therefore, a couple of hours would theoretically be all one needs to heal the world. The world is not as big as it used to be; with our connectedness there is no excuse for the continuance of war, famine, human rights violations, and intolerance. All one has to do is care.

Tharuna Devchand

So Chastity Bono is transforming into the new and perhaps improved Chaz Bono. Yip, being lesbian just didn't cut it. Fourty years of life in a woman's body was so torturous that she prefers to chop off her lactiferous lumps and grow a penis. Cher, if she accepts their little 40-year-old girl undergoing a sex change, is probably busy sitting in the hospital waiting room, redrafting the "I've Got You Babe" lyrics:

 They say you are old and the truth will show

Through the complications of being a male Bono

Who cares about the fuss, do what in your heart is true

And we'll still love you no matter what you do

Babe, you got us babe

You got chest hair babe

Oh lord help my babe….

Humor aside, transgender surgery is a serious issue and often controversial. It really is amazing what medical advancements can do. You can almost become anyone you want to be, change any part of you that you are unhappy with, mold your face into one that resembles your favorite celebrity, slice off bits, add bits or change bits to your lover's approval…whatever you wish.

Does it make you more confident? Does it help you fit in? Does it make you feel loved? Does it make you happier?

We tell ourselves that we do these things to make ourselves happy, but happiness doesn't require all that pain, humiliation, societal ostracism and extremity. I'm not an expert on knowing how it feels to be a man trapped in a woman's body, but honestly I wouldn't know whether I was meant to be a man or I was just unhappy with being a woman. We don't pluck our eyebrows instead of wearing them bushy across our whole forehead or stick contacts in our eyes instead of wearing those nerd-magnet glasses because it makes us happier; it just makes us more "likable," makes us feel that we can love ourselves a little more because others would approve of the change.

Nine years ago when I entered high school, I had no friends whatsoever. One or two people would talk to me but not without making me the butt of their new joke to their own circle of friends. Lunch times were spent in the library, free time was spent with my nose in a book, and teams were normally chosen without me causing my teacher to be mediator and assign me into the first one that squirmed. So that year I made the resolution to change. I threw out my Stephen Hawkings and filled my shelves with overpriced Cosmopolitan magazines; I made a bed for myself in front of the TV and wrote down lists of the cute jock-type actors that seemed to be popular in the school corridors so that I could float around throwing their names into arb conversations:

It made me one of the more popular girls in school; it also made me fail some subjects in my last year. The truth is that I never actually changed because changing wasn't what I needed to make me like and accept myself. It didn't make me happier in the true sense; it just made others like me. Reading made me happy, and a monthly diet of Cosmopolitans did not satisfy me, which made me watch more and more mindless TV until I was so engrossed that I couldn't tell who I was any more. I ran away from who I really was because it made others like me. When you hide from something you love, it doesn't make you stop loving it; it just makes you forget how good you felt when you were doing something you loved. Of course I can't say the same for Chaz. Only he understands his decision. I don't.

Tharuna Devchand